DUBAI: Astronomers searching for alien life in the universe say they have picked up mysterious radio signals from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away.
The discovery was made by a team scientists from University of California, Berkeley, that form part of the Breakthrough Listen project, set up by Professor Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
The project’s aim is to discover whether there are other life forms somewhere out there in the universe, or if we really are alone.
But try not to get too excited, the researchers say they do not know what the source of the 15 radio signal bursts was and sadly they have said they doubt there is any truth in early speculation that alien life forms have been sending the signals.
This is not the first time the scientists have picked up on these signals, which they first thought were the fallout from a catastrophic event in space, like a supernova.
Researchers saw the bursts repeated in 2015 and 2016, which points to the possibility that whatever is causing them, is still there.
So far suggestions for what the source might be have included rotating neutron stars with extremely magnetic fields and energy sources used by extraterrestrial civilizations to power spacecraft.
Dr. Vishal Gajjar at UC Berkeley Research Center told the UK newspaper the Telegraph they had “no idea where the radio bursts come from.”
“If some form of life would like to produce a signal that is detectable to another civilization this could be a way to do it, but I don’t think they are coming from intelligent civilizations… There are more theories than the number of sources. We have opened more questions than answers. As we do more study we find more weird things.”
And Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees, who chairs the project, told The Telegraph: “Some journalists have written that this is evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. Nobody is claiming this. But it confirms that their equipment is working well.”